SCHOLARLY work on the history of Ireland's role in multilateral organisations has tended to focus on the country's membership of the United Nations, which was achieved in 1955. This has been covered in the writings of Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien and it has also been the subject of a number of recent doctoral theses.

The country's role in the League of Nations, between 1923 and 1945, has attracted less attention. Prof David Harnes's Restless Dominion (published in 1969) was a significant contribution and was written at a time when there was no access to official Irish. The unpublished thesis of Dr. Stephen Barcroft on the career of the international civil servant Sean Lester, who deserves a full biography, highlighted the role played by an Irishman in the service of the League.

Irish historians did not neglect the study of the League of Nations. It simply was not possible to address such a subject while the Irish archives were closed. In the early 1990s, the archives of the Department of Foreign Affairs became available for postgraduate research. Work has proceeded rapidly ever since and Michael Kennedy's book based on an expanded version of his doctoral thesis - is the first to appear on the subject.

This is an important survey of Ireland's role in a multilateral organisation. It documents the attempts by a new state to gain independent international recognition and to establish a separate identity from that of Britain. This work gives a sometimes humorous insight into the sheltered world in which many Irish cabinet ministers appeared to live. In 1926, the Minister for Finance, Ernest Blythe, wrote to Dublin about the progress of the Irish delegation on the road to Geneva:

"In Paris four of us went to the Moulin Rouge at about 9.30 ... We had to leave however in about an hour as we found that four unprotected men were subject to frequent attention to remain any length of time."

After a hasty retreat, it was on to Geneva. But luck was not with the delegation:

"We got a train at 8 o'clock on Saturday morning. It was the train in which we had seats booked but not the train for which we had tickets. Cooks must have stuck our seat vouchers in other people's tickets and vice versa. We were ejected from the train at Dijon where we had lunch and waited three and a half hours, visiting Cathedral Park etc. We did not get to Geneva until after 12.30."

The delegation worked very hard and when the morning session of the assembly ended early, Blythe and his companions went swimming and sunbathing at the lake. That had dire consequences for Blythe, as he wrote to his wife:

"I am sitting in my room with nothing on the upper half of my body but a thick coating of cold cream . . nay shoulders, and she upper half of my body have the colour of a lobster and the feel of a hot linseed poultice".

But life in Geneva, as Kennedy demonstrates, was not spent on the shores of the lake. Irish diplomats and members of both the Cumann na nGaedheal and Fianna Fail governments worked very hard - and with very few resources - to protect the country's national interests. The author might, in his future work, devote more attention to the interaction between Ireland and the other Dominions, using Canadian archives etc.

This is a good survey which opens up an important area to the general reader. It is an important academic contribution and Michael Kennedy's future historical contributions will be awaited with all the more enthusiasm if he takes more care with style and drops from his vocabulary for ever such phrases as, for example, "officially mothballed", "his finer on the pulse", "rock the boat", and, of course, the now ubiquitous "spelling out". {CORRECTION} 97012700023